Wind-up rechargeable Flashlight/USB port

Are we talking multi-day backpacking trips or multiple day-hikes? If you do a little searching on here you'll find that a USB power-bank type battery is generally the best solution. If you want to go the solar route, the suntactics panels seem to be the current champ. However, that requires you to set them up facing the sun.

I'm going to guess that the wind up style chargers are a waste of time & weight.

>1) Are wind-up products reliable and worth purchasing for backpacking or are the solar panels with USB ports better?

There is also thermoelectric systems like BioLite (not recommending it).

However, I think when going for a less than a week, carrying extra batteries or a battery bank tends to be the lightest option for recharging electronics.

Years ago, I has a wind up LED lantern (Goal Zero, I think) with a USB port that I used to take car camping until it broken. Now let me tell you, to get just a few minutes light time or a percent increase charge on a phone, I had to crank a really long time. I’ll bet that if you did the math on the weight of the extra food you’d have to carry to make up for the energy spent cranking, you’d find an external battery to be the more weight efficient, to say nothing of time efficiency.

Eventually, all that cranking broke the dynamo and that was the end of it. I’m sure better devices exist, but I’d say crank-chargers are a gimmick.

I also had a BioLite, and likewise, the USB charging on it was a gimmick. It was a fun stove, and with the grill attachment, not a bad thing to bring car camping or on short hikes, but it barely provided enough extra juice to charge a phone.

I share the opinion of the others who posted here that a battery pack is probably the most weight efficient (and cost efficient) way to keep gadgets like phones, cameras, and GPS units charged up on the trail. But in this thread, there is discussion of stripped-down solar panels, and Bradley Danyluk makes an argument for a larger solar panel and a smaller battery.

I saw the Solpro Helios Smart on sale one day, and with Bradley’s points in mind and my gadget addiction in full swing, I picked one up a couple of weeks ago. It has a 5,000 mAh battery and three solar panels that unfold, then fold up to smaller than a paperback book. In my limited testing so far, the claims of 90 minutes of sun for a full smartphone recharge and the number of recharges from a full battery fall short, (then again, maybe my phone isn’t a “standard smartphone” and these certainly weren’t “standardized testing conditions”), but it does seem promising enough.

I’ll be testing it on a 3 day, two night trip this weekend in South Carolina, but the first real test will come in August, when I’ll be backpacking for a week in Idaho. I suspect it will function better there, where it’ll get more sun (higher altitude, meadows, fewer trees, and above-treeline hikes) than we get in the heavily forested Southeast. It’ll be tasked with keeping two phones and a rechargeable headlight going for a week. I anticipate it won’t have any trouble with that.

The claimed weight is about 10 oz. For about the same weight (and much less money), you could get a 16,000 mAh battery, which should be good for charging a GoPro ten times or more, or 25+ hours of video use. And of course you can get a smaller battery and save more weight. 16,000 mAh should be enough to charge my iPhone 6 about 6 times, which is more than enough to last a week when using the phone sparingly, for picture taking and occasional GPS checks.

What will be a fun test is to see if, during my Idaho trip, keeping the Helios strapped to the top of my pack will provide enough juice for me to track my route continuously. Doing so is completely unnecessary, but I’ve enjoyed tracking my overnight trips (using a small 3,2000 mAh battery), and being able to track for an entire week would be the holy grail of hiking nerdery.

Crank- chargeable flashlights are heavy and you pretty much have to crank continuously to have any light. The one think I would consider them good for is to have in an emergency box at home for power outages as a backup in case you forget to put fresh batteries in the regular flashlight that is also in that box.
As for recharging a device with a hand-cranked dynamo I can only imagine it would be a real good workout.

Having poked into various discussions on the extra battery vs. solar panel question here on BPL, it seems like the extra battery is favored.

To get 5 watts out of a hand-crank unit, you'd have to put in 10 watts with your arm (due to mechanical and electrical inefficiencies). 10 watts is nothing for your arm to do for 10 seconds. But for many minutes, much less an hour?!? No, I wouldn't want to do that.

On another forum ,on threads like this, a guy would pop up every time raving on about miniature steam engines.
The problem was that he never posted (after several requests by typical skeptics like me, or well…me) a link to a single working unit.
They (the miniature/portable ones) were all "concepts", not something particularly useful when you are in the bush.
(OK behind the keyboard)

Look at some of the external batteries and love the price. Does anyone have experience with the Anker 2nd Gen Astro E4? Or any other advice on fan favorites.

Thanks for the great help.